Humble Pie (2 page)

It was football, not cooking, that was my first real passion.

Football was one way I thought I could impress Dad. He and my Uncle Ronald were huge Glasgow Rangers fans, and I could see that this might be a way to reach him. I must have been about seven when I went to my first Rangers match. I remember being up on Ronald’s shoulders and the amazing roar of the crowd. It was quite frightening.

Back in Stratford, I was chosen to play under-fourteen football when I was just eleven, and at twelve years old, I played for Warwickshire. Did I enjoy it? Yes, I loved it. And if Dad came to watch, it was a special relief, because at least that meant he wasn’t at home giving Mum a hard time. He didn’t always come to watch, though. Sometimes, he didn’t even ask you the score. I got used to it.

Then, when I was fourteen, I went up to head a ball, and a miracle happened. The ball went straight into the back of the net. Unhappily along the way, the goalkeeper had managed to punch me in the stomach. I went down, and the referee came over, sat me up, and made me do all these sit-ups. I felt dizzy and weird. So he sent me off to get some water. I went to pee, and suddenly I was peeing blood, and two minutes later, I collapsed.

In the hospital, they thought it was my appendix. Then they thought it was a collapsed lung. That night, I was doubled-over in pain. I was in fucking agony. They took me down to surgery, and my spleen had been perforated. They managed to repair the damage, though they took my appendix out as well.

Two weeks later, an abscess developed internally. So it was back into hospital. This time, I had blood poisoning. All told, my recovery took three months from start to finish. I couldn’t run, I couldn’t jump and I couldn’t train. And then, when I started kicking the ball again, I was nervous about going into a tackle. I had lost my confidence.

I remember my first serious game like it was yesterday. Dad was away, and you don’t take your mum to football, do you? It was an English
Schools competition – Oxfordshire County against Inner London – held at Loftus Road, the ground of Queens Park Rangers, in London. It was amazing, and all the London players were from the youth teams of Chelsea, Tottenham and Arsenal. I thought we were going to get hammered, but we beat them 2–1. However, it was a dirty game. I was taken off after a bad tackle to my knee – another injury from which it took me ages to recover.

After I’d recovered, I played in an FA Cup youth game, and it was there that a Rangers scout spotted me. They asked if I’d like to spend a week of my next summer holiday with the club. Fucking hell! It wasn’t just the fact that it was a professional club, it was RANGERS, the one club that would have an impact on the way Dad felt about me – or so I thought. By then, I was sixteen and was pushing the upper age limit for breaking into professional football. It was make-or-break time.

That first week was hard. I had an English accent, so they kicked the shit out of me for that. And they also made me use my right leg, which was fucking useless. We weren’t allowed to rely on only one foot, in much the same way as, in the kitchen, you must be able to chop with both hands. Anyway, after that first week, I just hated Rangers.

I was called back three times. The process was horrible, and I was in two minds about begging for a fucking contract out of Rangers. I was settled in Banbury in the flat with Diane, and I was enjoying my freedom. I had my first serious girlfriend. I’d started working in a hotel. I had a bit of money, and there was always Banbury United if I wanted football. I got about £15 a game.

Mum phoned. She told me to contact my Uncle Ronald.

‘Look, things have moved on,’ he said. ‘Rangers are going to invite you back up.’

He gave me a number to call. I phoned one of the head coaches.

He said, ‘We want you back up. Can you bring your dad to training on May seventeenth?’

At that point, I wasn’t even allowed to call the house. The trouble was that the people at the club wanted to know that I was properly supported.

I was thinking, ‘Fuck, am I properly supported? No.’

I rang Mum and asked her to tell him. I couldn’t face doing it myself.

So she did tell him, and, all of a sudden, he was…not nice, exactly, but smarmy. He was going to enjoy my success as though he was me.

I played for the first team twice, in preseason friendlies, but it was a bad time for me. Dad’s deceit was really getting to me.

Then they said, ‘We’re going to continue watching you. We’re really excited. We are going to sign you – but it’ll be next year, rather than this year.’

By this time, I’d been offered a cooking job in London. It was in a new 300-seater banqueting hall that had opened at the Mayfair Hotel. They were looking for four commis chefs: Second Commis, Grade Two. I don’t know what the fuck that means, even now. It’s a posh kitchen porter, basically, but the salary was £5,200 a year. Anyway, I told them that I could not start yet, and went back up to Rangers for the third year in a row.

This was the summer of 1984. Half the players weren’t there because they were travelling in Canada, so everything was focused on the youth players. They were deciding who was staying and whom they were going to sign that year. Ally McCoist was there, and Derek and Ian Ferguson. They’d been involved with the club since they were boys, and I suppose that’s all I ever really wanted to do, too: to stay put in one place, play football, and become a local boy.

The training went very well this time. I remember playing in a reserve team game against McCoist, and I had a good game. I was hopeful. I was feeling positive. The following week, we were playing a big charity match in East Kilbride. I couldn’t believe it. I was in the squad, and I got to play. The trouble was that they kept moving me around the pitch. And then, to make things even worse, I got taken off fifteen minutes before the end. They must have made at least seven substitutions that day. Never mind. I trained for another two weeks, and then I played in another youth team match – another really good game. I was starting to think that I might be in with a chance.

Then came a disaster. In a training session, I seriously damaged my knee, and, stupidly, I tried to play on. We had to take penalties with our right feet. We each had to put a trainer on our left foot and a football boot on our right. The idea was to make your right foot work constantly. It must have been nearly four o’clock when they divided us into two teams and told us to play fifteen minutes each way and to give it ‘everything you’ve fucking got’. By the time we finished, I was in serious pain.

I was out for eleven long weeks, but no sooner was I up and running again than I played a
game of squash – a really dumb thing to do. I tore a ligament and was in plaster for four months. Once the plaster came off, I started training like a demon, but I was still in a lot of pain.

At the start of the season, there was no getting away from it. My leg was just not the same. Jock Wallace, the club’s manager, and his assistant, Archie Knox, called me into their office one Friday morning. It was all over for me. I was not going to be signed. I remember their words coming at me like body blows. In those few minutes, all my dreams died. Part of me was wondering how I would manage to walk out of the room.

Telling Dad was one of the toughest things I have ever done, but I wouldn’t let him have the pleasure of seeing me cry. On and on he went.

‘You carry on badgering Rangers,’ he said. ‘You prove to them you are fit again.’

But far harder to take was his lack of sympathy for me. He didn’t have a single kind word for me that day. Later on, he even suggested that I might be exaggerating the extent of my injury. So I went home, shut myself away, and had a good cry.

I suppose I mourned for what might have been. But I had to let go of the game that I
loved. I was certain that I was doing the right thing in making a clean break. I had the example of my father and his so-called music career to encourage me, didn’t I? There was no way I wanted to be a pathetic dreamer like him for the rest of my life. I wanted to be the best at whatever I did. The only question was: what would that be?

When I was growing up, there wasn’t a lot of money for food. But Mum was a good, simple cook: ham hock soup, bread and butter pudding, fish fingers, home-made chips and beans. We were poor, and the idea of having a starter, main course and pudding was unheard of. We were always on free school dinners, and on the last Friday of every month, the staff made a point of calling out your name to give you the next month’s tickets. That was hell. It confirmed that you were one of the poorest kids in the class.

So I connected plenty of food with good times, with status. But I’d be lying if I said I was interested in cooking. I latched on to the idea of catering college because my options were limited, to say the least. I looked at the Navy and at the police, but I didn’t have enough O levels to join either of them. So I ended up
enrolling in a foundation year in catering at a local college, funded by the Rotarians. Did I dream of being a Michelin-starred chef? Did I fuck!

I remember coming home and showing Diane how to chop an onion really finely. I had my own wallet of knives. They had plastic banana yellow handles. At my restaurant in Chelsea,
Royal Hospital Road,
we wouldn’t even use those to clean the shit off a pan. But I treated my knives and my white chef’s clothes with love and reverence. I sent a picture of me in my big white chef’s hat up to Mum in Glasgow. I was so fucking proud.

Meanwhile, I had a couple of weekend jobs. The first was in a curry house in Stratford, washing up. Then Diane got me a job working in the hotel where she was a waitress. Again, I was only washing up, but that was when I first got the idea of becoming a chef. I was in the kitchen, and I was in heaven.

After a year, one of my tutors suggested that I start working full-time, and attend college only on a day-release basis. I’d made good progress. So I started work as a commis at the place where I’d been washing up, the Roxburgh House Hotel. My first chef was this twenty-stone bald guy called Andy Rogers who would tell you off without
ever explaining why. Dear God, you would not believe the kind of food that he got us to turn out. Roast potatoes started off in the deep fat fryer and were then sprinkled with Bisto granules before they went in the oven. This was to make sure they were nice and brown. We used to serve mushrooms stuffed with Camembert. I knew it was all dreadful, even then.

I was getting all this information at college, and I would come back and say, ‘To make fish stock, you should only cook it for twenty minutes. Otherwise it will get cloudy. Then you should let it rest before you pass it through a sieve, or it will go cloudy again.’

For this, I would get roundly bollocked by the chef. He didn’t give a fuck for college. I stayed for about six months, and then I got a job at a really good place called the Wickham Arms, in a small village in Oxfordshire. The owners were Paul and Jackie, and the idea was that I would live above the shop, which was a beautiful thatched cottage. Jackie was in her thirties. I must have been about nineteen. Paul was away a lot. Perhaps you can imagine what was going to happen.

One day, while Paul was off on one of his trips, Jackie rang down to the kitchen.

‘Can I have something to eat?’ she said.

‘What would you like?’

‘Just bring me a simple salad, thanks.’

So I got together a salad with a little poached salmon and took it up.

‘Jackie, your dinner is ready.’

And she opened the door – stark bollock naked. I put the tray down, and went straight into her bedroom.

For the next six months, I led a kind of double life, and it was getting heavy. Jackie told me that she loved me. The truth is that I loved making the jugged hare more than I did having sex with the boss’s wife, so I told them that I was leaving to go and work in London. She went bananas.

In the early part of 1998, they turned up at my restaurant,
Aubergine
. They’d opened a new restaurant, and they brought their chef to meet me. The trouble was, they got pissed and missed the train back to Buckinghamshire. We did try to ring around and find them a room, but hotels were £250 per night, which seemed to make them even angrier, so I sent out their dessert and then I fucked off.

At half past one in the morning, I got a call from Jean-Claude, my head waiter. He was screaming at me down the telephone. This chef of theirs was holding him over the bar, demanding
that the arrogant fucker who left without saying goodbye – me – come on the line. About fifty minutes later, I rocked up on my motorbike and there was Mark, my head chef, fighting with Paul, and Paul’s new chef fighting with Jean-Claude. They moved towards me before I had time to think.

Paul was going, ‘I trusted you. How dare you? You shagged my wife!’

All my staff were thinking: WHAT? I could see it on their faces.

The resulting punch-up caused major headlines when the Old Bill arrived. We all got taken off to make statements and then, when the whole thing was written up in the London
Evening Standard,
it was me who was supposed to have thrown all of the punches. It was all: ‘I came to meet the great master and instead found an arrogant bastard,’ ‘Brawl that wasn’t on the menu’ and ‘Ramsay punched my husband in the mouth.’ I had to take legal action to clear that one up. I won, of course. As for Paul, he sent me a two-page fax apologising. That was the end of that.

To be fair, I don’t really blame Paul for wanting to beat me up. Any man would have done the same in his position.

So I went to the starry lights of London. I was Second Commis, Grade Two, at the Mayfair Hotel, in its new banqueting rooms. I stayed about sixteen months, and I learned a lot. On my day off, I would work overtime without getting paid, just for the chance to work in the hotel’s fine dining restaurant. It was a tough place. If someone called in sick, you could easily end up working a twenty-four-hour shift. You’d work all day in the restaurant, and then, during the night, you’d man the grill and do the room service. At half past four in the morning, all the Indian kitchen boys would sit down and have supper. Then they’d go and pray for an hour, and you’d already be preparing for the next morning’s breakfast.

In those days, there was a really cool restaurant called
Maxine de Paris
, just off Leicester Square, and I’d heard that they were opening a new restaurant called
Braganza
. So I got a job there as a sort of third commis chef, but I didn’t stay long. All the food went out by a lift between the kitchen and dining room, which meant it was always a bit cold, and I just couldn’t come to terms with that. But there was an amazing chef there called Martin Dickinson, who’d worked at a restaurant called
Walton’s
, a Michelin-starred place, and he was just great. I
suppose that’s when I realised that Michelin stars were the Holy Grail. The Michelin guides award one, two or three stars to the best restaurants around the world – three stars is the top award, and there are only three restaurants in the UK with three stars. As Martin had worked at a Michelin-starred restaurant, he seemed like a god to me.

‘Get yourself into a decent kitchen,’ he told me. ‘Trust me, you don’t want to be working in a place that serves smoked chicken and papaya salad. Get the fuck out of here.’

I went up to the staff canteen, which was just a grotty little room where all the chefs would smoke. I grabbed a magazine and I took it out into the garden in Soho Square.

‘Christ,’ I said to myself. ‘There’s Jesus.’

On the magazine’s cover was a photograph of Marco Pierre White, all long hair and bruised-looking eyes. I was nineteen. He was twenty-five. He’d come from a council estate in Leeds.

When I looked at whom he’d worked with and where, I thought, ‘Fuck me, he’s worked for all the best chefs in Britain. I want to go and work with him.’

I phoned him up at his restaurant then and there.

‘Where are you working now?’ he said.

So I told him.

‘Well, it must be a fucking shithole, because
Alastair Little
is the only place that I know in Soho. If you’re not working there, then don’t bother coming.’

So I told him that I was about to go to France because I wanted to learn how to cook properly.

‘Have you got a job out there?’ he asked.

‘No, not yet.’

‘Then come and see me tomorrow morning.’

I turned up at what would become the famous
Harvey’s
, as requested. It had only been open about six months, and it would be another six months before it got its first Michelin star.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘We work so fucking hard here. This kitchen will be your life. There’s no social life, no girlfriends, and it’s shit money. Do you want to leave now?’

‘No, no. Not at all.’

So that was it. Next thing, he’s telling me to get changed and come into the kitchen. He was making pasta. I’d never made pasta in my life. He showed me how to do a ravioli. He showed me how to do a tortellini. Then I had a go.

‘Your fingers move fast,’ he said. ‘Do you want a job?’

‘Yeah, I’d love a job.’

‘You start Monday.’

‘I’ve got to give a month’s notice,’ I said.

‘Well, if you really want the job that fucking badly, you start Monday. What hours are you working?’

‘I’m on earlies for the next month.’

Problem solved. I did the early shift at my old restaurant from 7 a.m. until 4 p.m. Then I got the tube to Victoria, and the train from there to Wandsworth Common, where I’d work at
Harvey’s
until about two o’clock the following morning. It turned out that Marco’s warning about the restaurant taking over my life was only the half of it.

In the beginning, I admired Marco more than I can say. His cooking left me speechless: the lightness, the control, the fact that everything was made to order. But it was the toughest place to work in that you could imagine. You had to push yourself to the limit every day and every night. A lot of the boys couldn’t take the pace.

Marco was running a dictatorship: his word, and his word alone, was all that mattered. He had favourites, and then they would be out in the cold. He would abuse you mentally and physically. He would appear when you were least expecting him, silently, and his mood
swings were unbelievable. One minute, he was all smiles. The next, he was throwing a pan across the kitchen. Often, the pan would be full. Stock went everywhere, or boiling water, or soup, but you wouldn’t say anything. You’d wait for the quiet after the storm, and then you’d clear up, no questions asked.

The first time I saw Marco pummel a guy, I just stood there, my jaw swinging. I mean it. Jason Everett was physically beaten on the floor. We were all young and insecure, and Marco played on that. He’d find out about your home life while you stood there peeling your asparagus or your baby potatoes.

Then, four hours later, when you were in the middle of service and you’d screwed up, he would say, ‘I fucking told you that you were a shit cook. You can’t fucking roast a pigeon because you’re too busy worrying about your mum and dad’s divorce.’

Once, he was telling us all some crazy story about jumping off a train. Everyone was laughing, but then I said, ‘Bullshit.’

He picked up his knife. Then he threw it down. Then he grabbed me and put me up against the wall. It was almost like being back at home with Dad. Maybe that’s why I was able to put up with it for so long.

After Jason Everett had left, we were all in the shit. Working at
Harvey’s
was physically tiring anyway, but once we were a man down, no one got any breaks at all. Then Marco called me upstairs to the office.

‘I want you to do something for me,’ he said. ‘Jason is living in your flat, isn’t he? Well, I’ve sacked him, and yet he’s still in my kitchen. That’s because, when you come into work in the morning, you’ve slept under the same roof. I want you to go home tonight and kick him out.’

I told Marco that I couldn’t do this.

‘Are you going to sack me?’ I asked.

‘Sit there,’ he said.

The next thing I knew, he was on the phone. He rings some restaurant and says, ‘Hi, John, it’s Marco here. Look, I’m in the shit. My sous-chef [that was me] is being fucking awkward. So, John, three cooks next Monday.’

Then he put down the phone and said to me, ‘You’ll leave in a week’s time. I want your notice.’

I went back downstairs.

‘Everything okay?’ said the guys.

‘Yeah.’

I started making ravioli because, by then, I was completely running the kitchen. I finished the first one and then something in me just snapped. I hurled it at the wall. Fuck this, I
thought. I walked out and I went to the train station, where I tore off my chef’s whites and threw them in the nearest bin. I went back to the flat in Clapham.

‘What are you doing here?’ asked Jason. ‘It’s only six o’clock.’

‘Get changed, mate. We’re going to party. Marco’s asked me to kick you out and I can’t do that. He’s told me I’m going in a week’s time. Why should I wait a week?’

Fifteen minutes later, we’re just getting changed when suddenly Steve Terry and another chef, Tim Hughes, and all the French waiters come in.

‘Marco’s closed the restaurant because you walked out,’ said Steve.

I couldn’t believe it. The restaurant manager had to ring all the customers to make excuses for Marco closing the restaurant.

It was a Saturday night. We NEVER had a Saturday night off. So we went to the Hammersmith Palais and we got totally pissed. The next night, we all piled off to a pub called The Sussex. All the chefs in London used to meet at The Sussex on a Sunday.

It was about nine o’clock when, all of a sudden, the music stopped and someone shouted, ‘Is there a Gordon Ramsay in here?’

There was a phone call for me behind the bar. When I took it, a voice said, ‘Gordon. Marco. I think we should talk.’

I told him that I was off to Tenerife the next day.

‘What are you going to that shithole for?’

‘Marco, after what you did to Jason and what you did to me, to be honest, I can’t take it any more. You’ve pushed me to my limit.’

But he pushed some more, and I gave in. Why? The abuse I’d had from Dad had no point, but with Marco, the more tough he was on you, the more you felt yourself becoming better.